Poem for Wednesday and Wishing For Spring

My kids officially have no school for this entire week. In fact, since they have Monday off for President's Day, they will have more consecutive time off in February than they had for winter break, and we're wondering whether spring break will be abbreviated because of it. Right now it looks like the worst of the current storm is heading north of us -- looks like Baltimore through Philadelphia will get the worst of it -- they're saying we'll only get 8-10 inches instead of the 10-20 inches they were predicting yesterday, though considering a lot of neighborhoods haven't been cleared of the original 20+ inches from earlier, that's still an awful lot of snow.

So the biggest event of my day was discovering while emptying the dryer that Adam had left a Cadbury chocolate egg in his pants pocket which had melted all over everything, including the inside of the dryer itself. His clothes, of course, had to be washed all over again, and may never recover; the rest of the laundry got folded while we continued our Harry Potter film festival and watched Prisoner of Azkaban, which I still think is the best-directed of the films despite the screenplay flaws. We had eggplant parmesan for dinner, and later we watched the first episode of Desperate Romantics, which is enormous fun particularly since we've visited the homes of several of the Pre-Raphaelites while visiting the U.K. -- it's like The Tudors meets the Victorian art world. As a break from winter, here are some photos from McCrillis Gardens last spring: